If Julianne Markow, the new director of the New Children’s Museum, needs a reality check, she takes a walk downstairs and watches children interact with the museum’s eclectic collection. n “You can just go down there and suck up all that energy and the joy,” Markow said. “And then you come back up and continue what you are doing. For me, that’s been wonderful.” n During Comic-Con, however, she got an extra jolt. Children were not only interacting with the art, but also with characters from the children’s TV series “Adventure Time” in the museum’s first collaboration with Comic-Con and the Cartoon Network.

“We have to take risks, and we have to try new things,” said Markow, the museum’s executive director and chief executive officer since December.

In a relatively short time, the former administrator of the San Diego Museum of Art has been making her mark on the New Children’s Museum. Where the previous director, Rachel Teagle, placed the emphasis in “children’s museum” on “museum,” Markow is shifting it more to “children.”

“We are not really changing who we are, except in the sense that we are even more focused on the children and the educational opportunities,” Markow said. “We are still a children’s museum built on contemporary art; we’re just trying to find a lot of different ways to reach more children and different children.”

Creating collaborations

Markow has talked with schools, social service organizations, colleges, museums, corporations, civic leaders — literally dozens of individuals and organizations — as she seeks to create partnerships and achieve more visibility for the museum, which has an operating budget of $3.5 million.

“We’ll figure out which ones are the most meaningful,” Markow said. “You have to talk to a lot of people to figure out where the best connections are.”

During the summer, she’s able to look out her window to the park across the street and see kids involved in the museum’s summer camp program, which it is offering in partnership with the UC San Diego Extension. And during the year, children from the Monarch School were regular visitors to the park and the museum in a program Marlow hopes will be a model for partnerships with local social service organizations.

“We’re calling it ‘Partners in Creativity,’ ” Markow said. “Right now the Monarch School comes every week and brings their kids. We’ve talked to organizations, the YMCA and the San Diego Center for Children, about bringing their children, their families, here on a regular basis for facilitated visits.”